


Then We Had Tea

by nimblermortal



Category: Norse Mythology
Genre: Comfort, Gen, Siblings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-21
Updated: 2012-12-21
Packaged: 2017-11-21 21:39:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,990
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/602353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nimblermortal/pseuds/nimblermortal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It snowed last year too: I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea. - Dylan Thomas</p><p>Jörmungandr's worried that he'll be the next to be banished. Loki asks his sister, the newly-crowned Queen of the Dead, to reassure him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Then We Had Tea

“Hel, will you do something for me?” Loki asked.

“What is it, Father?” Hel asked, because when the Trickster was your father, you never promised anything.

“Try to put a brave face on it for Jormungandr. He’s taken it all pretty hard.” said Loki.

Hel almost laughed at him, and would have if it weren’t for the image of little Jormungandr being upset. Loki hated being laughed at, but it would have been worth it. “I’ll do my best,” she promised.

“Good girl,” Loki said, and kissed her dead hand. She loved him for that. No one ever wanted to look at her dead side, but Loki never seemed to notice.

****  
****

Hel met her brother at the gate to her new kingdom. Jormungandr was slithering uncertainly about the gateposts. He uncoiled to meet her, but he only came a few feet; the rest of him remained looped about the posts in a lemniscate, as if they gave him comfort. Hel had never seen those gates comfort anyone else, but her siblings had always been different, and Jormungandr had liked wrapping around things since he was small enough to fit on Loki’s forearm.

“Jormungandr, come in,” Hel said, offering him her arm, and like a proper gentleman he took it and set his head under it, slithering smoothly to keep his head comfortably under her arm. It was a most courteous effort, and Hel would never tell that she had practiced it with him for hours in the sunlight, and held Fenrir in a headlock when he laughed at them.

“I can get back out, right?” Jormungandr asked. Hel thought it was quite brave of him to come so far into the land of the dead before asking, and she felt a wash of love and pride for her little brother.

“Of course,” she said. “I rule here, remember? You can leave whenever you like.”

“As long as you say so,” Jormungandr said, but he was used to doing as Hel asked. Her brothers might have grown stronger than Hel, but they withered if they stayed in contact with her dead side for too long. She had to answer to Loki for this abuse of her power, but Loki had never been one for enforcing rules.

“I said you may leave whenever you like. I’ll have it carved into the gate if you like.”

“Yeah? Who’ll do the carving?”

“My people,” Hel said simply. “Odin made me queen here.”

“That’s not serious,” Jormungandr said. “He sent you to Niflheim. Nobody cares what you call it, that’s banishment.”

“I am queen here,” Hel said. “I have my army and I have my servants.”

Jormungandr didn’t say anything. Hel knew what he was thinking because she had heard it for as long as she could remember. Jormungandr was thinking that all her army and all her servants were only dead. They weren’t even the best of the dead.

“Is that what they told you?” she asked. “That I am banished, disgraced, sent here against my will? Do you believe them?”

“Of course not,” Jormungandr said.

“Do you believe Father when he lies?” Hel asked. Jormungandr didn’t have a response to that. “Do you believe I am unhappy?”

“I have seen no evidence to the contrary,” Jormungandr said, trying to sound grown up. “You’re different here.”

“I was not happy in Asgard,” Hel said. “That is the difference.”

“And you are happy here?”

“In Asgard, as here, people look at me and see the bone of my face,” Hel said. “They know that I am half dead and always have been. In Asgard, that was a disgrace, and a cause for whispers and discretion. They were afraid of me, because this bone reminds them that even gods must die. Here the bone is familiar, and the flesh... Every corpse was once alive.”

Jormungandr did not believe her, but he was looking at her with jealousy all the same. People did not sneer at her here. “Is there a place where snakes are normal?” he asked.

“If there is, Father will search for it for you,” Hel said, and he would look, he would start off with the best intention of looking, but - there were always distractions, for him. “Let me show you my kingdom.”

Jormungandr hesitated. He was afraid. So were all the living afraid of dying. Hel resolved to take him home for tea, though the castle was only half finished. She had considered leaving it so, that it would forever be half one thing and half the other as she was. She hadn’t decided yet.

“My queen,” said one of her subjects, “is that your new watchmonster? We thought it would be a dog -”

Hel had whirled away from Jormungandr and was holding the sharp bones of her fingers against his throat. “Even in my kingdom it is possible to die a second time,” she said, “Or a third, a fifth, a five thousandth time. This is my brother, and he will be treated with respect.”

“As you say, lady,” said the servant, still young enough to be terrified of dying. Hel turned back to her brother and, smiling wryly, dropped a curtsy.

“You’ve grown,” she said.

“Not you too,” Jormungandr groaned. “Everyone is always saying how I’ve grown since they last saw me.”

“Well, you have,” said Hel. “There’s nothing wrong with growing. Everybody does it.”

“Most people don’t do quite so much of it.”

Hel elbowed his jaw. “Don’t be ridiculous. You’re the perfect size for yourself. You should be proud! What does Father say about it?”

“Father says I’m beautiful,” Jormungandr said. “Father says I’m going to break hearts.”

“There, you see?”

“Father also thought that Fenrir would be Odin’s favorite, and that he could protect him when he bit Tyr. He thought that neither of you would be banished.”

“You’re worried that you’re next,” Hel said. She sat down, because she was queen and she could sit wherever she liked, and Jormungandr dropped his head miserably into her lap. She stroked his smooth scales and remembered when she used to sing for him. “It’s only reasonable, since this happened to Fenrir and to me so close together.”

“Then you think I’m right,” Jormungandr said. She could tell Loki had been lying to him.

“Remember, I was not banished,” Hel said.

“That’s difficult to believe,” Jormungandr said, “and you can’t tell me Fenrir’s happy.”

“Yes, well,” said Hel. She couldn’t argue with that. “Have you been to see him?”

“Yeah. He’s - he’s not right, down there. They should let him move around. You know how he is.” Jormungandr sighed. “Have you been to see him?”

“No,” said Hel. She almost told him that she couldn’t leave her realm in such a tremulous position of construction. She almost lied; but she needed his trust. “I am not permitted to go.”

“‘Not permitted so I won’t’ is not how Father raised us,” Jormungandr said.

“He’s still raising you,” Hel reminded him, but he was right. Father had taught them to see the wall, and the dirt under it and the air over it and the mortar between its stones and, failing all that, the space between its atoms. “I’ll visit our brother later. I haven’t had a chance to look at the wall yet.”

“He’d like that,” Jormungandr said. “I think he needs a lot of visiting. It’s not right for him down there.”

“Does Father go?”

“Not as much as he ought. Odin’s watching him. He’s watching all of us.”

He was afraid of stepping wrong. That was what made him, and all of Loki’s children, a disappointment to their father. They saw a cliff and looked for a path down. Loki saw one and stepped over the edge with his eyes closed, throwing out feathers without knowing if the cliff would be high enough for him to grow wings before he hit the ground. Hel would have chastised him, except their mother was the same. One day the cliff wouldn’t be high enough and then - well, if he was lucky, Hel would see him here.

She made Jormungandr tea. She had gotten a tub for him, but he had grown and it wasn’t big enough to hold as much as he needed. When she got enough water, he complained that it was salty. That was fair; she had gotten the water from the ocean. But it wasn’t as if Jormungandr cared what he ate, so she just reached her good arm into his mouth while he was talking and tickled the inside of his cheek.

“Hel! I hate that!”

“Quit whining and be a proper guest, then,” Hel told him, and stuck her tongue out. Jormungandr chased her around the edges of the room. She didn’t quite let him catch her, and he didn’t pounce when she ran out of breath and had to stop, gasping, and lean against a part of his side that hadn’t made it around the room yet.

It felt almost like when he had been just big enough for them to try coiling him up so that Hel fit inside, which they had done until she couldn’t see over the top of him. That had been fine as well until he put his head over the top so that she was completely sealed in, and she panicked and thumped his side and it had taken far too long for him to uncoil. She hadn’t spoken to him for days afterward.

She wished she had, now, because he was right; he was the only one of Loki’s children still allowed to travel freely, and Odin was looking for a reason to imprison him as well. Odin didn’t like monsters. Odin didn’t like monsters and Loki couldn’t see them. Loki truly thought they were safe right up until Odin declared them animals and banished.

He had to have changed his mind now, though. He rode Sleipnir every day. Yes, Fenrir could be a bit boorish, and biting off Tyr’s hand really had been inexcusable, but it wasn’t an excuse to chain him up in the dark forever. But Odin had also liked Hel; he had sat near her, especially when she sat behind a screen or with her dead side away from him, and he had told her stories and danced with her one-handed. He had told her, as a secret, that they both had one eye. Hel had told him she would fish his eye from the bottom of Mimir’s well and put it in her empty socket. She had shot Huginn out of the air to prove her skill at archery and he had only laughed, and he had given her a kingdom.

“What are you thinking?” Jormungandr asked.

“That Odin will banish you,” Hel said.

“Oh.”

“That Odin will banish you and it need not be a prison,” Hel said. He had not imprisoned her, not really. He would not imprison Jormungandr; no one could be mad at Jormungandr, certainly not Odin, who tried to rub his scales backward and called him Jor. Not Odin, who had asked him if he was mungry when he was quite small. Not Odin, who had laughed when he provoked an admittedly much smaller Jormungandr until he had a snake dangling from his nose.

“Yeah?” Jormungandr asked. “What about Fenrir?”

“I don’t know about Fenrir,” Hel said.

“What about Sleipnir?”

“Sleipnir is his bosom companion.”

“Sleipnir is his horse.”

Hel didn’t say anything. It was hard to tell what either Sleipnir or Odin thought of the other. Sleipnir, half horse and not just shaped so, was different from his half-siblings. He didn’t talk, he just gave ideas of how he felt, and they usually came out pretty murky. Hel was half sure he was happy and proud of his position. She didn’t know what he talked about with Loki when the two of them went walking in the garden, or what it felt like to talk to Sleipnir when both he and Loki were horses.

“What do you think he’ll do to me, then?”

Hel leaned back and stretched against Jormungandr’s scales. “He’ll wrap you around something,” she said. “He knows you like to wrap. It’ll probably be a prison of some sort - he’ll make you his chief warden. His key and his lock.”

“Will he wrap me around Asgard?”

“Would you fit?”

“Not yet,” Jormungandr said. “I’m still quite small.”

Hel laughed. “See, there,” she said. “When you’re not watching, you know you’re still small, no matter what the others say.”

“He’ll make me his warden?” Jormungandr asked.

“It will be a great honor. Almost as great as being queen of the dead is.”

“I don’t know about that.” He didn’t, and maybe he never would. Well, Hel had never understood their father and all his animal forms. She thought of him as an Asgardian shapeshifter even though she knew he had been born of a jotunn. She didn’t think it odd that her brothers were a horse, a wolf, and a snake, but Loki didn’t think it odd that he was a horse, a wolf, and a snake, and a jotunn and a god and a fly and a falcon and who knew what else. He didn’t see the difference between any of his forms. He didn’t see the difference between Svadilfari and Thor.

She was beginning to understand, though, when she lived here in the dark and the fog and the dead, among the dead and separated at last from the living. Hel was half of each, and she saw the difference, oh yes, it was hard to miss that line, and yet she felt equally at home among the dead as among the gods.

Almost equally. She had spent more time with the living - and yet. The dead looked at her living side and saw only what they had once been. There was nothing disgusting about the past.

“I am happy here,” Hel said.

“You are content here,” Jormungandr corrected her.

“There are things that I would change, but I would not go back.”

Jormungandr was quiet. His tongue flicked out, in, out again. “I should go back,” he said.

“Very well,” said Hel. She walked him out.

He paused before the gate again - the gate she could not pass. The last tip of his tail had, at some point, vanished into her kingdom. Some part of him was wondering if he really could still leave, or if this was Odin’s revenge on him. Some part of him wanted to know if he was Hel’s watchdog after all.

“You never wanted to be a queen,” he said. “You never even wanted to be a princess.”

“I did want to be fair,” Hel reminded him. “Now I am the last judgment.”

“And your people are dead,” Jormungandr said disdainfully. Hel put her hand over one of his eyes; her dead hand. She held it there, gently, as if she could be gentle with him when she knew that under her touch he was slowly dying.

“Jormungandr, my dear brother, I told a subject of mine I would kill him five thousand times to earn respect for you. Would you like to know what I would do to you to earn your respect for my people?”

Jormungandr’s length thrashed once, in response to the death of his eye, his blindness, his sense of impotency and panic. Only once; the rest of him trusted his sister, and would not destroy her kingdom. Hel had never been so proud of him, though she would not say so.

“I understand,” he said. Hel took her hand away and watched his eye regrow.

“It’s only, I want to be fair,” she said. Jormungandr grinned at her.

“You’re beautiful, Sis,” he said, and butted her without thinking, which meant it was hard enough to throw her into the wall. She staggered back to her feet, her ribs aching, and couldn’t stop smiling herself. She meant to shake her fist at Jormungandr, but he was already disappearing into the distance, running away from her as he had when they played chase, and probably laughing just as hysterically. His coils swayed in wide zags everywhere except where she stood, where they narrowed so they wouldn’t hit her. How did he do that? How did he always know where he was?

How could Odin ever punish such a thoughtful boy?

****  
****

“Thank you, queen,” said Loki. “My son seems much encouraged now.”

Hel stared at him. Had he already forgotten that she was his daughter? He would not step through her gate. “You are, of course, very welcome,” she said. “And what news of Odin?”

“Oh, he’ll come around,” Loki said airily. Hel wanted to shake him. Come around from what? she wanted to ask. She wanted to shake him. What is Odin going to do to my baby brother? But he stood on the far side of her gate, and she could not cross it.

“What is he proposing?”

“He wants to banish Jormungandr to the seas of Midgard, if you would believe it,” Loki said, laughing. “It’s a completely ridiculous overreaction.”

To what, you infuriating man? Hel wanted to ask, but he was thanking her for her time and waving goodbye. She raised her hand in return - the living hand, the lying hand.

She went back to her castle and stared into a bowl of clear water, but she had no gift for scrying. She filled it with seawater and pretended she was making tea for Jormungandr, but he would only ever swim in that water now.

“Grow big, brother,” she whispered into the water. “Grow strong. Wrap your coils around the earth until it relies on you to hold it together.”

She could feel the steam of her breath rising back to her face on one cheek only. She wished she had her father’s gift for sorcery, that she might put all her magic into four words.

“And then let go.”


End file.
